The Story of Charlotte's Web by Michael Sims - review

Wednesday 3 August 2011 11.30 EDT
First published on Wednesday 3 August 2011 11.30 EDT

"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast."Out to the hoghouse," replied Mrs Arable. "Some pigs were born last night.""I don't see why he needs an ax," continued Fern, who was only eight."Well," said her mother, "one of the pigs is a runt. It's very small and weak, and it will never amount to anything. So your father has decided to do away with it."These are the opening lines of Charlotte's Web. In case you haven't read it, guess what? The pig – Wilbur – survives. To paraphrase Chekhov, you don't put an axe on the first page of your story unless someone's not going to use it.Elwyn Brooks White was a wily operator. Michael Sims, in his new biography, sums him up as a man who, "from childhood to old age . . . was painfully shy, terrified of speaking in public or before a microphone – yet hugely ambitious and willing to try almost anything when no one was looking".Sims describes White's idyllic upbringing in the family's grand home in Mount Vernon, NY, where he was the youngest of seven children, and where he spent much of his time playing in the family's fancy barn. "Painted pale grey, matching their big, handsome house even to the gables in the loft", it was the perfect breeding place for childhood fantasies. White's father was vice-president of a company that manufactured pianos, and his mother was the daughter of the then very famous painter William Hart, so White grew up with that blessed combination of big money and high art. Not that it seemed to do him any good. He was, according to Sims, a melancholy child, "plagued by wild fantasies and indefinable nostalgia", with a "vague sense of yearning and loss". He was, in other words, perfect writer material.He loved to read wilderness and animal stories: A Little Brother to the Bear, Wild Animals I Have Known, Lives of the Hunted. His first publication, aged nine, in 1909, was a poem called "To a Mouse", in the magazine Woman's Home Companion. Sims dilly-dallies over details of White's early romances, but the pace picks up when he graduates from Cornell, becomes a staff writer on the New Yorker, and marries the brilliant Katharine Angell, the magazine's fiction editor. There are brief sketches of White's relationship with Harold Ross, the editor, and with James Thurber. But these are stories that have been told before. Sims's objective is to get to the big house with 40 acres on the coast of Maine that White and Angell buy together in 1933, and where he eventually settles down to write the work for which he became famous.There is, of course, much more to White than his goose-feather children's stories – Stuart Little (1945), Charlotte's Web (1952) and the little-known The Trumpet of the Swan (1970), about a trumpet-playing swan named Louis. As Sims has noted, in an essay elsewhere, White had "his anxieties and hypochondria, his passionate defence of free speech and civil liberties, his one-man campaign for world government". And there was also his work with his old Cornell professor, William Strunk Jr, on The Elements of Style, and his extraordinary portrait of New York City, Here Is New York (1949). But Charlotte the spider and Wilbur the pig are the stars of Sims's story. In Charlotte's Web, according to Sims, White "preserved in amber his response to the world".Amber doesn't come from nowhere. Sims traces the roots of the novel to two important sources. First, White seems to have been inspired by Don Marquis's typewriting cockroach, Archy, who "embodied both Elywn's ambitions as a writer and his sense of being small and insignificant". Hence Charlotte – White's very own small and insignificant insect. Then there were White's troubled feelings about being a gentleman farmer. In a 1948 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, "Death of a Pig", White had written about the paradox of caring for and feeding an animal that he was planning to slaughter. Hence Wilbur.And finally there was the process of composition – the usual combination of day-dreaming and hard slog. On the one hand, Sims writes, there were all the hours White spent in his boathouse in Maine, staring out at Mount Desert Island and Cadillac Mountain. On the other, there was all the research in New York Public Library, dredging through American Spiders and Their Spinningwork, The Spider Book, and American Spiders. This is all interesting, in its biographical way. But Sims gets closest to describing White's true genius when discussing the characteristic tone of his work for the New Yorker, with its "lushly textured observations and playing with language" and its "ability to recount a passing experience and overlay it with both thoughtful irony and a kind of uncluttered clear-sightedness"."Animals are a weakness with me," White wrote. And White remains a weakness for many of us. Though not all, of course. There will always be critics. Edmund Wilson bumped into White in the offices of the New Yorker soon after the publication of Stuart Little. "I read that book of yours. I found the first part quite amusing – about the mouse, you know. But I was disappointed that you didn't develop the theme more in the manner of Kafka."Ian Sansom's Mobile Library series is published by Fourth Estate.